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About Events

  • Updated

This article describes what events are at Evolv AI and how they can be used to measure visitor behavior.

Table of Contents

What are behavioral events in digital experiences?

Behavioral events in a digital experience refer to the actions, interactions, and activities that individuals engage in while using a website, app, or other digital platform. These behaviors provide valuable insights into how users interact with the digital experience and can help businesses make informed decisions to improve customer satisfaction and achieve specific goals.

Different types of behaviors include:

  1. Page Views / Loads or Page State Changes
    This behavior is typically measured when a distinct URL is loaded. However, it can also be attributed to significant changes in the page state without loading a new URL, like in single-page applications. Examples include loading a product detail page, going through a checkout flow, or reaching the order confirmation page.
  2. Page Interactions
    These behaviors include hovering over an element, clicking a button, toggling a tab, interacting with a form field, dragging and dropping items, or scrolling to a specific portion of the page. For example: "Click Add to Cart" or "Select Payment Option".
  3. Behavior Sequences
    These involve navigating through a specific sequence of pages, like going back and forth between product listing pages (PLP) and product detail pages (PDP). They can also include engaging in a specific sequence of actions on a single page, like selecting different options before adding a product to your cart.

The most common scenarios for triggering events are page interactions, followed by page views. Below are some code examples for each.

Page Interaction

var heroBtn = document.querySelector('.btn.homepageHero__button');

heroBtn.addEventListener("click", function() {
  window.evolv.client.emit('click.hero_button');
});

Page View

// Send event on Product landing page load
window.evolv.client.emit('page.product_landing.loaded');

Behaviors that occur outside of the digital experience

It's important to note that some behaviors may occur outside of the digital experience. These are also known as 'off-line events'.

For instance, if your website encourages visitors to call a sales representative, tracking the conversion may involve a status change in SalesForce rather than page loads. 

Additionally, certain digital experiences might cross multiple properties where Evolv AI cannot directly track events, like affiliate referrals.

How the system uses events

In our system, an event represents a specific behavior detected in your digital experience.

  • Events are created in the Manager and are defined by a unique key How to create an event in the Manager 
  • Events can be tracked across all projects using a custom integration or within a project
  • In each project, a single event is selected as the Optimization Metric. This metric is used to measure the performance of the chosen audience and guides AI decision-making. Other events not selected as the Optimization Metric are considered "secondary metrics."
    Learn more: Understanding optimization metrics and how they can be used
  • Events can define an audience, among other user attributes.
    Learn more: About Audiences

Associating events with visitor sessions and projects

Events are associated with a visitor’s session, and these sessions are linked to projects. This connection allows us to measure and analyze user behaviors across projects and in each project against specific test ideas.

How the system tracks events

Events are tracked by the system when fired from your digital experience using any of Evolv AI’s SDKs or a third-party source. 

When using events in your digital experience, you can program them to fire on page loads and in-page interactions.

Events can also be fired outside of your digital experience, like when a status in SalesForce is updated. In this case, the third-party source can send data to Evolv AI using the Participant API.

Firing Events

Firing events requires someone familiar with coding in your codebase.

Firing events is an integral part of tracking user behaviors. You can fire events using code from our SDKs. Here's an example using our Javascript SDK:

evolv.client.emit('event_name')

//Examples:
evolv.client.emit('clicked_hero_cta')
evolv.client.emit('added_to_cart')
evolv.client.emit('completed_order')

Learn more: Firing an event from the digital experience

Reporting on Events

You can easily report on events to gain insights into your digital experiences:

From a Project: Within a project, you can measure the performance of all events using the Conversion Event filter.

Note, data in a project is based on unique events. Events fired multiple times in the same session are counted as 1 event.

From the Events Page: The Events page provides a daily average of total events and unique events across all projects. Clicking on an event in the listing displays a graph of the last 7 days.

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